Leong, director of digital design at magazine, has a talent for both quantifying his universe in surprising ways and presenting the cold results with wry, self-deprecating warmth.

His book becomes a commentary on the joy and myopia of being an admirer of cartoonists and their creations. Indeed, even as I wondered how much research was in these graphics, I came across a pie chart labelled "Reasons for the charts", which explained that 20 per cent are "to inform" and the rest are "to entertain".

That split is disingenuous: Leong's graphics are info-essays, and for every playful breakdown of the Gotham City police department utility bill, there's an ideology matrix that attempts to pinpoint the political leanings of pop icons. (Who knew the Hulk was a libertarian?)

A bar chart of how much leg Wonder Woman has shown since her 1941 debut is a commentary on changing views on sexuality, just as a fever chart, comparing the oppression in Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran with the author's rebelliousness, is a sharp editorial about tyranny and human nature.

Some of Leong's creations are so exhausting to pick apart that my brain flashed to early 1990s , which famously felt like a study in clever design climbing up its own posterior.

But even the over-design here is charming, a recognition of how cluttered story lines get after a century of twists; Leong is honouring the single-minded genius of generations of cartoonists with single-minded genius.

In a perfect world, his book would quantify the amount of time that you spend with it, but no one would want to see that number.